It's been a bad day & someone deleted all my recordings of HTGAWM
by Breaking Bunnies
Summary: Can't you let me drink tea and cry at 5 am in peace? [In which Yin is hurt and Yang tries to help. Shameless sibling love fluff.]


This was supposed to be a drabble...and then it wasn't. And I finished it all in a day! Don't toss your gas masks and emergency baked bean supplies away just yet.

And for the record, yes I am going to print out the "Chili Taco Tuesday" line and frame it.

Title: It's Been a Bad Day And Someone Deleted All My Recordings of "How To Get Away With Murder"

Summary: Can't you let me drink my tea and cry at 5 am in peace? [In which Yin is injured and Yang tries to help.] Shameless sibling love fluff.

Rating: Teen because Yin says "fuck" one time and Yin thinks about Lena thinking about Yang thinking about condoms.

XXXXX

Knock knock.

"Go away, Yang," Yin moans out—rather zombie like, Yang thinks, but then again sleep deprivation has always done the opposite to his twin what it does to him. And the last time he was still up by 3 in the morning he was muttering to himself about moose(s?) in supermarkets whilst scooping himself some ice cream.

"How about I not and you open the door." Silence. "Or I could kick it down." Although he would rather not; Master Yo might sleep as heavily as the Colossus of Rhodes, but he doesn't want to push his luck. Some dances are only for two, y'know?

Yin's bones nearly jump from her flesh, cold store diet tea sloshing onto and into her bathrobe, as Yang gives the kitchen door an experimentally soft kick. That echoes through the dojo and sounds of a horse jumping on hardwood.

Yin drops her head onto the table— ignore the bolt of pain that races into her eye, the way pink locks of hair only reach down into one side of her vision. She lets out all of her lungs in one sigh. She looks at her cracked, still-somewhat-pink-painted nails, and waits for Yang.

Yang twirls the cerulean flame of his sword about his fingers as though he's twirling cotton candy, collecting it all before he pinches the tip of his bamboo shaft, magic melting it malleable, allowing him to flatten it into a knife edge.

A blue eye lifts, peers out over a pink -robed arm at the old door only a dozen paces away, its broken knob rattling as a slit of green stabs through wood that may as well be butter. It starts at the bottom, flaming blue like stove light, and slices upwards, then sideways, upwards again and then a semi circle—

He's cutting a Yang-shaped hole in the door. She makes a noise between titter and snort.

The thin wood thumps on the floor, sending the remnants of bills and angry fan letters flying. Yang, paradoxically, ducks his head as he steps through the hole, long-stridden, like he's trying to slip in on her unawares.

She buries her head into her arms so he can't see the simper.

"As your older brother, it's my duty to help you in your time of listening to Linkin Park unironically," he announces austerely.

"Don't you mean time of crisis? Or need?" She asks, head still in cotton.

"I'm trying to be comic relief here; cut me some slack." Yin hears bamboo hitting wood, feels hands on her shoulders, squeezing. "Besides, what's really the difference?"

She lifts her head a smidgen (!), just enough for her eyes and eyebrow (and bubbling gray skin where her other eyebrow used to be) to be visible, although unable to see her brother's playful smirk. "First of all: how dare you accuse me of still listening to Linkin Park."

He squeezes again. "Linkin Park, Marina and the Crystal Gems—"

"Marina and the _Diamonds."_

"Whatever. I've heard it all: same shit, different aesthetic."

"I'm surprised you even know what aesthetic means. Good job!" She finally lifts her head, matching his smirk, leaning back in her chair so it can all be on display. Yang had seen the initial wound, the blood, pouring over the fingers clasped to her eye, masking the wound like liquid cloth, but he hasn't seen the true, unbandaged aftermath.

She folds her arms over her chest and studies his face.

What is left of Yin's strawberry blond hair, contained mostly to that on the left side of her head, has been hastily brushed together into a pigtail, bobby pins keeping bangs and lonely locks of right hair in line.

Master Yo had saved her eye by practically dumping his aura into it, blending magic together with herbs and pancake batter in a blender, soaking her wounds in slimed bandages, all while Yang had made himself useful moping up blood with his own gi, setting said gi on fire to start up the fireplace, and sticking Pac Man and Dora the Explorer bandaids over the little cuts on her fingers and thighs. The skin has, as aforementioned, grayed and bubbled up, like

—he doesn't want to grimace, say "Ouch," because he knows pity isn't what his sister wants right now, so he bites his cheeks as soon as he sets his eyes on her and takes a deep breath...and, finally, says, "Remember that time I ate a whole box of Sweet Tarts and couldn't eat for two days?" Because his tongue—you guessed it— had turned ashen and bubbled.

She blinks. Then she smiles. "You ruined Weeniehowl for me for, like, three years." Learning even candy is dangerous is a very traumatizing lesson for a six year to have to take in.

"But think about how much closer you sharing all of your candy with me made us."

"All I saw was people throwing money at us while you were basically having a seizure."

He sits down on the table abreast to her, crossing his arms like she. "And then that lady from apartment B—"

"Wanted you to join her dance studio! Ah—" Yin lolls her head back, the ceiling fan's light illuminating both the sweat on her forehead and the scarlet puff about her uninjured eye"—that pissed me off so bad." She punches his knee and chuckles out, "I'm still kinda mad at you for that."

"'S'not my fault. (I know.)" He takes her cup of lukewarm tea off the table, sips it, grimaces, fake-gags, and hands it back to her. "That shit tastes awful."

"It's diet green sweet," she replies indignantly.

"See?" He stands, steals behind her and across the kitchen to the cupboards and stoves. "It's green tea; that's why it's so awful."

She shifts, arm over the back of her chair. "Because of Yuck?"

"Exactly." He's taking down a mug. A pink mug with Hello Kitty quite large and visible across the front, throwing up a peace sign in a cherry-and-white tie-die dress. Yin rolls her eyes at his response. (And later she'll think back to the image of her brother in a singlet and boxers, navy hair like a bush with a tornado for a hair stylist, holding that dumb mug Roger Jr. had bought him, and roll her eyes again.)

"I wonder what that band is still doing," he says. "You'd think some techno-EDM-mariachi mish-mash would chart at least a little bit around here." He taps the side of his thigh and within a blink his sword has flown to him, floating in all it's wooden-igneous glory. Turns his sword into a boomerang and tosses it, a few seconds later grabbing both it and the bottle of soda from the counter by the front door it had gathered.

"You're operating under the fallacy," Yin replies over the hiss of air, "that "good," "indie," and "charting" can ever exist in the same sentence."

"Except for "Somebody I Used To Know.""

"Except for that, yes."

Yang gulps from the bottle as he eyes the innards of cupboards, finding naught but bowls and boxes of expired cereal and plastic spoons.

"What cha looking for?" His sister asks.

"Stuff."

Her dropping her head to the chair-back is swiftly followed up by a yell.

Splashing Coca-Cola on somebody isn't usually what you would do to help comfort them, but he was running, cut him some slack. The Hello Kitty mug has shattered its entire bottom half like it's Chili Taco Tuesday.

He rubs her back, unawares of the half-bottle he's sloshes onto her, ghosts his hand over the stubble of a rough shave. The one during which he had held her hand and let her bruises and nigh break the bones in two, the one which Dad had had to give in order to truly access all the damage. Her scalp is as bruised as his fingers, so he guesses that makes them a bit even.

"Are you okay?" he whispers. He drops down onto a knee. There are tears in her eyes, yes, and her hands seem to tremble ever so with the desire to cradle the injury, but she merely breathes in a handful of times, sounding wheezy and labored and through a wall of teeth. But nothing falls from her eyes and no other shout from her lips.

Finally her shoulders slack, and out she soughs, "I'm fine," as though pretending her house isn't on fire.

"At least now I've finally heard you say 'fuck.'"

The ghost of—is that a smile?—tugs at the edge of her lip, briefly.

"Now c'mere," Yang sighs himself, pulls her down to him, shoulder-to shoulder, resting the unmarred marge of her visage against his neck. He rubs her back in circles. And so they stay, silent as the night cricket-chirps outside and the faintest snores ooze in from a bedroom across the house.

The elephant has taken its form as a pile of bloody and blue-soaked bandages lying on the table. Abreast to a compact mirror.

Yang, eventually, tugs down the collar of his singlet, down almost to his navel, letting his little sister feast her gaze upon the banquet of scars, faded and fresh, all shapes and sizes, coupled with bruises yellow with age or purple with youth.

"You wanna know what Lena has never_ once_ said to me?" he asks.

Yin curls a hand under one cheek, the other slung around her brother's neck, and sniffles as response.

"She's never told me any of these are beautiful, or anything like that. But she's also never asked if we have a spell that can get rid of them."

Yin thinks of the time Lena had regaled instructing Yang to buy a paper bag for his face instead of condoms, but she decides to merely simper and not mention it.

"So what I'm trying to say is that you'l still be pretty even your new Zuko look." She titters, but he continues on, "Pretty good when I'm not in the room, pretty okay when I am."

Yin shoves him away as he chokes out ,"But pretty either way!" between his mirth, and she curtly replies, "I'm gonna beat you!" ere promptly battering his head and chest with sleeve-gripping fists, a tempest he can only fall back onto his rump from and futilely hold up his arms.

After a minute or so, said tempest wanes, and both twins find themselves on the floor, laughing to bring stabs to their sides. Yin coughs harshly, reaches back for her cup and gulps some of her tea ere she turns to the fallen Kitty behind them.

With a gesture and whisper, cerulean glues the mug back together, good as new. She levitates it to her person, quirking her eyebrows at the embellishment. "What were you doing with this?"

Yang props himself up on one hand, running the other over his sleep-heavy eye. "I was gonna make you one of those brownies in a cup."

An arm catches him around the neck once more, two cheeks pressing together. "Thanks," Yin says, ere tightening her embrace into a chokehold, roughly chafing his scalp with her knuckles. "You huge_ nerd!" _

He tries to break loose, paws at her arm, but Yin won't let up and-

Yang hugs her, whispering, "You have to stop taking Nightmasters' super-moves for me," in the spilt-second before he hefts her up over his shoulder, potato-sack-style, and stands, ignoring the kicks and punches.

"Yin two, Yang zero," Yin replies, a grin stretching her face painfully, yes, but oh well.

"If that helps you sleep at night, Sis."

He pushes her up backwards via feet, so she lands on her hands and flips ere too much is exposed.

"I'll get the flour and—"

"Nope," Yang interjects, pulling open cupboards by the refrigerator. "Go sit down. I'm not completely incompetent in here." He doesn't mention having seen the recipe for mug brownies only once over two months ago, because that's no small hurdle for a kid who helped take down the Original Satan before he finished puberty. Obviously.

Ten minutes later the microwave has blown up, taking a good fourth of the kitchen with it.

Yang stands there with his face blackened like coal and his hair blown back into spikes.

Yin steps to his side for the sole purpose of making him see her trace a slow line from the corner of her eye down her cheek, lips puppy-pout.

Yang can hear their father starling awake, bubbling and muttering as he probably fights with the counterpane.

Purple eyes look to blue. "Not a word," he says, as the first rays of sunlight begin to pierce through the clouds and paint their bellies light orange.

She spins on her heels with a smile, stealing back to the table, the bandages and compact mirror that now seems so much smaller than she had thought it just a few hours prior. "My lips are sealed."


End file.
